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Obama, who has often eschewed the gun-slinger swagger of his predecessor, George W. Bush, when talking about the country’s international adversaries, adopted an uncharacteristically bellicose tone when a reporter on Monday questioned his sense of moral obligation to oust Assad, who has been blamed for the slaughter of thousands of civilians and rebel fighters.

And it came on a day when the White House confirmed that nothing the Israeli military has done over the last week — including a pair of strikes targeting Iranian-made missiles near Damascus — came as a surprise, according to a senior administration official close to the situation.

The president, his options hemmed by the unpredictable reality of a smoldering civil war in a global tinderbox has tried —with limited success — to balance tough talk with calibrated action, a policy that has left both hawks and doves dissatisfied.

“In the end, whether it’s bin Laden or Qadhafi, if we say we’re taking a position, I would think at this point, the international community has a pretty good sense that we typically follow through on our commitments,” Obama said during a joint White House press conference with South Korea President Park Geun-hye.

The comment was telling: While the U.S. planned and executed the May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden at an isolated compound in Pakistan, Obama’s position on Libya was more ambivalent. He only committed to aiding the anti-Qadhafi rebels after weeks of planning — which drew criticism from congressional hawks led by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has also accused the president of sloth on Syria.

In the end, the U.S. provided critical command and control for French and British airstrikes — and the Libyan dictator was killed in the streets by his own people a few months after the bin Laden raid.

On Monday, a visibly annoyed Obama reiterated his commitment to investigating reports that Assad’s regime has deployed sarin nerve gas on its own people and evoked the memory of pre-invasion Iraq intelligence failures to justify his caution — despite reports that Assad might have crossed the “red line” Obama announced of using chemical weapons.

He said he will “make a decision not based on a hope and prayer, but on hard analysis,” adding that a rush to war would ultimately endanger the nation’s long-term security interests.